The collected essays in Migration and Cultural Contact: Germany and Australia investigate historical documents, letters, film, literature and other cultural sources to reveal how each country influenced the culture, intellectual thought and aesthetics of the other from earliest colonial times through to today.

Opening with the cultural and religious legacy of Carl Strehlow's missionary work at Hermannsburg, its impact on Freud's cultural anthropology and DaDa, the book investigates the different aspects of the German presence in Australia: from the 19th-century migrations to the 'enemy aliens' of two world wars. Other essays explore representations of Australia in the German literary imagination: is it Europe's Utopia or Paradise Lost?